Milkmaids

In the morning I need to charge the car, so I charge it, and then I go back to the hotel where I had lunch, and the Greek waiter is working, and I figure he’ll recognize me.

The breakfast is free for hotel guests. I sit down waiting for someone to come so I can pay for it, and nobody comes for about four minutes.

So I get up and serve myself at the breakfast buffet.

The thickest cut of lox I have ever had in my life. A sausage that’s delicious and juicy and rich. Bacon. Two sunny side up eggs. Brown Icelandic bread, the thick hearty rich kind.

The waiter sees me a bunch of times and never says anything, because he assumes I’m a guest.

It works out perfectly.

I really need that, because the night before I wanted dinner and had no food, so I bought a pizza at the bar for way too much money and it was not a good pizza.

Jesse from Hotel Sundal, who used to work at Iris and who pointed me to the Salmon Eye, also told me about the milkmaid cabins.

I can’t find the trail again, so I hike off trail, and get soaked again, all the way through. It takes a while to get up there.

The milkmaid cabins are eight cabins that used to be a summer village where women went up to milk the sheep and collect the milk. They’ve all been restored. They’re perfectly cottage core, very humble, very cute inside. It’s $10 a night for guests and you just have to keep it clean.

Which is impossible, because you get there with no water after being in the woods for days. There is no way to keep it clean. They are pristine and nobody staying there can possibly keep them that way.

I photograph all of them and I don’t sleep in any of them.

Then I get back in the car, because it’s been cloudy and wet for a day and a half and I want to dry off. And I go into a very long tunnel, miles long.

And I come out the other side and it’s sunny.

I cannot believe I spent a day and a half on the other side of that mountain, where it was cloudy and gray, when the sun was over here the whole time.

Who loves the sun.

I pull over into an idyllic spot with a big red barn and soft grass, right on the fjord. I jump into the water and then dry off in the sun while doing yoga. Over and over, like a sauna. I feel sun for the first time in thirty six hours, after a day and a half of gray that felt like Vermont in April.

Later I discover this whole place is a campsite. The land is beautiful until people get there. Ten euros a person, by far the cheapest campsite in Norway, so I stay for the day.

The guy who owns it comes around to collect the money and stays to talk to everybody, because it’s the busiest it’s been all year. He tells me about a man on a motorbike who hit the guardrail and went off the cliff, and the bike came down and punctured him, and they airlifted him to the hospital. His girlfriend was fine. She was just very shaken up.

And then more and more people arrive and it gets harder to use my favorite spot by the water, and the whole thing fills up, and everybody there is just not vibing.

There’s a girl in an acid love shirt with a scowl on her face. Acid and love. You would think, based on the shirt, that she’d be nice. I’m playing music quietly. I’m chilling out, and these people are not about that.

I guess a lot of them are tired. A lot of young families. A French couple who are hardcore punks. A German brother and sister who have spent ten days traveling together.

Ten days alone in the woods with your brother. Nuts.